Review | Book review: why we love cats -The Lion in the Living Room explains
This enchanting journey helps to explain why we love cats despite their indifference to us
The Lion in the Living Room
by Abigail Tucker
Simon & Schuster
3.5 stars
I read much of Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room, appropriately, with a cat on my lap. And though I sat quietly, she did not: sometimes perching on the arm of my chair, staring vaguely but fixedly into space while her tail blocked the pages; sometimes jumping out of my lap and noisily racing around the room for no apparent reason.
In other words, my beloved orange tabby seemed hellbent on proving Tucker’s thesis: while house cats are the world’s most popular pet – both in the flesh and online – they offer us curiously little in return.
Outdoors, they spread disease, annihilate bird species and aren’t as good at controlling rodent populations as they’re said to be. Indoors, cats are self-contained – “They don’t need people to complete them,” writes Tucker – and mostly sedentary. Unlike dogs, they have few innate duties and don’t seem to care whether they please us.
But The Lion in the Living Room is no anti-cat screed. Tucker is an engaging writer and a sucker for the felines. (She had me when she referred to her own sleeping ginger cat as an “oversized croissant”.) And her brief, lighthearted book takes us on a fascinating journey: the evolution of the house cat, their similarities to their “big-cat” relations, cat husbandry, the indoor-cat phenomenon, the truth behind toxoplasmosis, the question of whether cats are at all useful (short answer: not really), the LOLCat internet craze and the central question of why so many of us are crazy about cats. (Apparently, it has to do with what an ethnologist calls “baby releasers”: cats, with their round faces and big eyes, remind us of our own young.)
Will this book change your opinion on cats? Probably not. Will you enjoy reading it? Absolutely, particularly with your own tiny lion close by.
